The tech reference is a bit dated now, but I used to say that if you wanted to know what Sean Hannity thinks before he thinks it, beat him to his fax machine in the morning.

On Monday it might be “Oceania is at war with Eurasia; Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.” If on Tuesday the message in the tray is “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,” he’ll switch to saying that without blinking an eye, and maybe without even noticing.

It is something we have all noticed of eager authoritarian followers. He is a loyalist. Whatever Big Brother says he repeats to prove his fealty.

That, Matthew Yglesias suggests, is a defining characteristic of the Trump White House:

When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.

He is a man more interested in loyalty (to himself) than in personal integrity. Or the truth. “On Bullshit,” by Harry Frankfurt of Princeton’s Department of Philosophy (1990-2002), describes the break between the truth-teller trying to paint a picture of reality, the liar who knows the truth but hides it to deceive, and someone like the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future.

Another reason for promoting lying is what economists sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then you know right away they aren’t fully with you. That too is a sign of incipient mistrust within the ruling clique, and it is part of the same worldview that leads Trump to rely so heavily on family members.

But Yglesias adds that repeating the Master’s lies serves a similar function for rank-and-file authoritarian followers. Lieutenants repeat the bullshit to demonstrate loyalty. Followers use it as a shibboleth to display their membership in the tribe:

… Trumpian bullshit serves not only as a test of elite loyalty, but as a signifier of belonging to a mass audience. One chants, “Lock her up,” at a rally not to express a desire or expectation that Hillary Clinton will serve jail time for violating an obscure State Department guideline, but simply because to be a certain kind of member of a certain kind of community these days requires the chant.

The big, beautiful wall that Mexico will allegedly pay for, the war on the “fake news” media, Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate, and now the secret tape recording that will destroy James Comey are not genuine articles of faith meant to be believed in. Their invocation is a formalism or a symbol; a sign of compliance and belonging. The content is bullshit.

Yglesias writes something Sean Hannity knows in his gut without thinking: “The loyalist is just supposed to go along with whatever the line of the day is.” The danger is that constant repetition of bullshit — sold as “alternative facts” — will break down the public’s cognitive ability for discerning truth from fiction. That ability is a prerequisite for the maintenance of democracy and liberty, which is why it has been supported from the founding of the republic. But for authoritarians, critical thinking skills are a threat to control. Thus, courses in public schools that develop them among the masses must be suppressed. Is it any wonder that access to public colleges is shrinkingparticularly in states controlled by Republican lawmakers?

Also disturbing is the number of supposed political leaders willing to debase themselves in service to their liege lord by repeating his bullshit. There is a seemingly endless rogue’s gallery of cable news interviews by official spokespersons and surrogates eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the leader and/or their tribe through public betrayal of the truth. Is repeating bullshit bullshit?

Frankfurt distinguishes liars from the bullshitter in lines prior to “For the bullshitter…” above. He writes:

A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Trumpian bullshit is how many are so short on integrity as to be willing to repeat it, whether as proof of loyalty or just to “catapult the propaganda.” As Frankfurt observes, the bullshitter has no care for the truth. Trump is an “I say what’s on my mind” kind of guy, Yglesias observes. The truth values of any of it is irrelevant. But many of those willing to repeat it (Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer are two examples) may yet know what they are saying is untrue. Trump is bullshitting. His surrogates are lying because lying is company policy.

Ben Montgomery and a team from the Tampa Bay Times asked 400 law enforcement agencies across Florida for records of when an officer fired a gun and injured or killed someone between Jan. 1, 2009 to Dec. 31, 2014. The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri prompted questions about how often such shootings happen. The result of the inquiry is an extensive report titled “Why Cops Shoot.”

“It was very difficult to get agencies to cough up records,” Montgomery says in a video accompanying the story. Collecting the information took two years. Their mission was to answer a basic question: “Are there ways to do this where people don’t have to die?”

The Tampa Bay Times report arrives even as Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in a March 31 memo that his office would call a 90-day pause in its consideration of police reform efforts begun under the Obama administration. In Baltimore last night, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar issued an order rejecting the attempt by Sessions and the Trump administration to delay public consideration today of the consent decree between the Department of Justice and the Baltimore police department. Bednar’s writes in the order, “To postpone the public hearing at the eleventh hour would be to unduly burden and inconvenience the Court, the other parties, and, most importantly, the public.” The hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. EDT.

The Sessions memo recommends that the “misdeeds of individual bad actors” not “impugn or undermine the legitimate and honorable work” of law enforcement. Yet the Tampa Bay Times report uncovers yet again patterns of policing that result in unnecessary deaths of citizens — many unarmed
— and community mistrust of police services. Too many police shootings are “lawful, but awful” according to Chuck Wexler, Executive Director of the Police Executive Resarce Forum (PERF).

This is one such example from “Why Cops Shoot”:

In January 2010, Orange County sheriff’s deputies moved in on Torey Breedlove, a suspected car thief in an SUV. Breedlove tried to drive away but was surrounded by deputies with guns drawn. A witness said Breedlove raised his hands, but deputies said they heard an engine revving, so they fired 137 rounds, killing Breedlove. A grand jury cleared the deputies, but Breedlove’s sister sued on behalf of the man’s four children. Evidence presented in the civil case showed the revving engine was a deputy’s SUV, not Breedlove’s. His sister got $450,000.

“The conduct at issue here,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gregory A. Presnell, “is more akin to an execution than an attempt to arrest an unarmed suspect.”

Montgomery is circumspect. “There are not any incidents that we looked at in these 770 cases, in which 830 people were shot,” Montgomery says, “which clearly spell out that this officer intended to murder someone. That’s not the case at all as far as we could find. What is the case are, in some cases, lack of training, just the rush to judgment.”

And simply bad practice.

In 2014, for the first time ever, police took more from American citizens than burglars did, according to economist Martin Armstrong, who used statistics from the FBI and Institute for Justice. Police departments use the money, cars and homes seized through civil asset forfeiture to support their budgets.

[…]

“The answer to the riddle of why officers who are assigned to drug and gun and other contraband-oriented assignments, who are armed to the teeth, often in military fashion, take the time and trouble to make traffic stops for mundane offenses like ‘tag light out’ or ‘no seat-belt’ can be answered by the multi-million dollar forfeiture trade that supplements police incomes,” Cook said.

Mike Chitwood, now sheriff of Volusia County, was police chief in Daytona when Montgomery interviewed him. Chitwood believes the key to the use of force is proportionality. He has been engaged for years in Wexler’s group and brought training in deescalation and active listening to Daytona:

“We’re proficient in (shooting), but we’re not proficient in the No. 1 thing: dealing with people,” he said. “I think the No. 1 complaint in America against police officers is rudeness.”

He also began to try to keep crooked cops out of his department by hiring people with solid, deep background investigations. He established an alert system to try to identify rogue cops. He started randomly drug testing officers.

[…]

What’s particularly interesting about Chitwood is the stricture of his policies, especially when it comes to police chases and use of force. He’s blunt. Don’t shoot into a vehicle. If you do shoot, he said, you’d better have tire tracks on your chest.

“I think most shootings that we see are because we the police put ourselves in a position that we don’t need to be in,” he said. “Today, for some reason, we’ve switched out of the guardian mentality and we’ve become warriors. And that’s not what American policing was founded on.”

One might not blame an incoming administration for stopping to review the policies of its predecessor. Then again, people are dying. “Why Cops Shoot” gives an indication of why and what might be done about it in addition to creating a national police violence database for studying it. Montgomery concludes we need one. The question this morning is whether Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration are more interested in American policing being tough or just. Wait, don’t answer that.

“We’re the only country in the world that polices like this,” Chitwood says.

Chris Hayes put together a must-watch mashup of how Donald Trump used his patented Trump University flim-flam to win the White House. Watch it here

The lawsuit against Trump University ended yesterday in a settlement for his victims:

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel ruled in favor of a $25 million settlement between President Trump and customers of his defunct Trump University, NBC reports. Trump and his lawyers reached a settlement shortly after the election; Trump did not admit to wrongdoing in the case, but nevertheless agreed to settle.

“This never was a university,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last June. “The fraud started with the name of the organization. You can’t just go around saying this is the George Stephanopoulos Law Firm/Hospital/University without actually qualifying and registering, so it was really a fraud from beginning to end.”

One wonders how the rest of us can collect damages as victims of what was never a presidency. The sort of glitz and bamboozlement that worked for Trump in his business dealings is failing him horribly on the world stage. Leaders of world powers are not so easily bamboozled, Trump being the exception that proves the misrule. Trump’s poll numbers in his first 100 days have sunk lower than Obama’s lowest, and Obama is the president Trump seems most eager to best.

President Trump brought his chaos-and-loyalty theory of management into the White House, relying on competing factions, balanced by trusted family members, with himself perched atop as the gut-instinct
decider. He now realizes this approach has flopped, and feels baffled and paralyzed by how to fix it, numerous friends and advisers tell us.

[…]

The chaos dimension has created far more chaos than anticipated. Come nightfall, Trump is often on the phone with billionaire, decades-long friends, commiserating and critiquing his own staff. His most important advisers are often working the phone themselves, trashing colleagues and either spreading or beating down rumors of turmoil and imminent changes.

This has created a toxic culture of intense suspicion and insecurity. The drama is worse than what you read.

Neal Gabler admits he, like many others, got Trump wrong. While Trump may dsiplay the style of fascist leaders and have the temperament, he lacks the skills:

It’s not Trump’s ability to marshal the forces of repression that should terrify us. It’s his inability to marshal forces to conduct even the most basic governance. Trump really is a presidential Joker. He knows how to wreak havoc, but he doesn’t seem to know how to do, or seem to want to do, much else.

The threat from Trump isn’t fascism, Gabler believes, but anarchy. From an anarchist leading anarchists, in fact. Exhibit A: the Republican insurance plan that was doomed to fail:

Just think about it for a moment. The Republican replacement was really a non-insurance bill, by which I mean it flew in the face of the most fundamental principle of insurance — the healthy pay for those who aren’t. It is the sort of community of interest that is anathema to conservatives who believe it is every man for himself.

The upshot is that you cannot have “conservative” insurance. It isn’t tenable. When you have freedom of choice with every person getting to choose whether to be insured or not, and with those who are insured getting to choose what they want to have covered, you do not have a viable insurance system. You have anarchy. Anarchy was built right into the Republican plan.

Built in because it was never a plan at all. Like Trump, Republicans never had any interest in one. But huge tax cuts for the already rich is a hill they will die on.

When you come down to it, Republicans are really anarchists dedicated to undermining government in the furtherance of an economic state of nature where the rich rule. What we saw these past few weeks was not the failure of Republicanism, as so many pronounced on Friday, but its logical and inevitable conclusion. Republicans are great at opposing things, destroying things, obstructing things, undoing things. They are really, really terrible at creating things because they have no desire to do so.

The rich ruling explains Trump’s fascination with Vladimir Putin as much as theories about Trump’s Russian business connections. Putin is the total package. Money plus the authoritarian muscle Trump lacked. For his royalist legions — more Tory than T-party — Trump is the king they secretly long for. It’s all the same to them if he is a mad king.

Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner have tried to sell the Trump White House’s serial failures as the normal glitches experienced in any tech startup. It’s a sign of Trump’s entrepreneurial derring-do.

Soon after Republicans nominated reality TV star Donald J. Trump for president last night, New Jersey governor and failed Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie conducted a reality show trial for Hillary Clinton in prime time. It might have been less creepy if some faux cardinals burst onto the stage armed with soft cushions. But no, there was only one, soft Chris Christie repeating debunked allegations against Cinton and asking the mob(?) in the coliseum, “Guilty or not guilty?”

The theme for last night was Make America Work Again. Nobody seemed to speak to it. They were too busy attacking Hillary Clinton.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about it: the systemic discrimination faced by black people in this country. Even white people like me know about “the talk” black parents have with their sons:

Every black male I’ve ever met has had this talk, and it’s likely that I’ll have to give it one day too. There are so many things I need to tell my future son, already, before I’ve birthed him; so many innocuous, trite thoughts that may not make a single difference. Don’t wear a hoodie. Don’t try to break up a fight. Don’t talk back to cops. Don’t ask for help. But they’re all variations of a single theme: Don’t give them an excuse to kill you.

For all the good it will do.

In the wake of the recent shootings of black males Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (as well as the shootings of policemen in Dallas) on top of all the others — Brown, Garner, Scott, Gray, Rice, McDonald, etc. — it seems there is no instruction one could give or follow to ensure a black male will survive an encounter with police.

By
Tom Sullivan
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The Twitter thread yesterday from the DNC’s platform committee meeting in Orlando was pretty entertaining. There was a lot of passion from the Bernie Sanders delegation. The debate on fracking was particularly heated. Filmmaker Josh Fox (Gasland) spoke in favor of language to ban the practice:

Police are still trying to sort out what happened when snipers opened fire on police during a peaceful protest in Dallas last night. Hundreds of people were in the street protesting the police shootings this week of Alton Sterling (in Baton Rouge, LA) and Philando Castile (in St. Paul, MN) when the shooting began. Police were the targets. Twelve officers were shot and 5 of them died. Two civilians are reported injured. Police say there is no known connection to international terrorist groups. The New York Times reports:

The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said that four people armed with rifles were believed to have carried out the attacks. They positioned themselves in triangulated locations near the end of the route the protesters planned to take.

The police had three people in custody and were negotiating in the early-morning hours with a fourth, who was in a garage in downtown Dallas at the El Centro community college.

A St. Paul man died Wednesday night after being shot by police in Falcon Heights, the aftermath of which was recorded in a video widely shared on Facebook in which the man’s girlfriend says the “police shot him for no apparent reason, no reason at all.”

Friends at the scene identified the man as Philando Castile, 32, cafeteria supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori School in St. Paul.

Castile had cooked “for 12 to 15 years” at a Montessori School. Let that sink in. Philando Castile is black.

The girlfriend started the live-stream video with the man in the driver’s seat slumped next to her, his white T-shirt soaked with blood on the left side. In the video, taken with her phone, she says they were pulled over at Larpenteur Avenue and Fry Street for a broken taillight.